Editing Modernism in Canada

Paul Barrett received his PhD from Queen’s University. His dissertation is a study of black diasporic writing in Canada, particularly as it transforms notions of citizenship and multiculturalism. He also has a background in Computer Science and has published on digital texts. He is interested in the relationship between race, digital technology and emerging forms of textuality.

Michèle Rackham Hall is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Trent University in Peterborough, ON. She is presently working with Dr. Zailig Pollock on an art book and digital catalogue raisonné of the poet-artist P.K. Page-Irwin’s oeuvre. The project will be part of the Collected Works of P.K. Page (Porcupine’s Quill).

Michèle specializes in Canadian interartistic culture and modernism. Her dissertation, “Between the Lines: Interartistic Modernism in Canada, 1930-1960” was supervised by Brian Trehearne at McGill University. She has worked as a Docent at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ON, where she gave tours on the gallery’s permanent collection and delivered public talks on Canadian artists.

Matt specializes in modernism and periodical studies. His dissertation, “Middlebrow Politics and the Book War: Periodicals, Print History, and the Commercialization of Literature, 1905-31,” was completed under the supervision of Sean Latham. He comes to EMiC with many years of experience in editing and the digital humanities, including working as project manager and digital editor of the Modernist Journals Project, an editorial assistant with the James Joyce Quarterly, and webmaster for the Modernist Studies Association. His work in digital media involves designing collaborative environments to facilitate teaching and research–an objective that he has already achieved in providing online access to archival and rare print materials through the Modernist Journals Project, and that he plans to extend by creating for EMiC a digital commons of modernist texts in English and French.

Vanessa Lent holds a two-year EMiC (Editing Modernism in Canada) postdoctoral fellowship. Her project initiates a much-needed reassessment of poet and playwright Wilfred Watson by creating a hybrid print/digital edition of his ambitious first play Cockcrow and the Gulls (1962). This project will be nested within a larger scholarly initiative at the University of Alberta where Dr. Paul Hjartarson leads the joint digitization of the Wilfred Watson Fonds and the Sheila Watson Fonds. Her project consists of a fully annotated print edition of Cockcrow prefaced by a critical introduction and followed by selections of archival material including journals, letters, and drafts that will contextualize the composition and staging of the play

Emily Robins Sharpe holds an EMiC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph, where she is working with Dr. Susan Brown and Dr. Alan Filewod. Her project, a collaborative effort co-directed with Dr. Bart Vautour, is entitled “Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment.” This multi-phase project will establish a digital archive and print anthology of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature. With Dr. Jonathan Eburne, Emily is also working on a scholarly edition of Hugh Garner’s short stories. She completed her dissertation, “Mosaic Fictions: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Canada’s Spanish Civil War,” at Penn State University.

My postdoctoral work contributes to a collaborative project, “Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment,” which I am co-directing with Dr. Bart Vautour, an EMiC co-applicant. The Digital Research Environment (DRE) is a long-term, multi-phase project that will provide integrated public access to the large amount of diverse Canadian cultural materials concerning the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The conflict animated Canadian public discourse, and inspired nearly seventeen hundred Canadians to travel to Spain where many joined the International Brigades as armed volunteers in the anti-fascist cause. The artistic community in Canada also adopted Spain as one of the most rigorously represented subjects of the time. Yet, While American and British scholarship on the conflict has persisted, Canadian cultural texts remain dispersed, difficult to access, and in some case completely undocumented. Our project begins to remedy this unfortunate critical disparity by seeking to develop a long-term research agenda for the recovery and remediation of Canadian responses to the conflict. Dr. Vautour and I envision “Canada and the Spanish Civil War” as a three-phase project that aims to alleviate this critical gap, representing the first scholarly effort to collate this Canadian material for public consumption in a systematic way. The first phase requires conducting archival research and gaining digital skills, as well as scholarly consultation and project development. The second phase of the project builds upon the first to see the preparation and publication of a clean-text print anthology, Selected Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War, with a scholarly apparatus housed in the DRE. The third phase of the project—perhaps the most logistically challenging—will see a massive collation and digitization in order to create a digital collection within the DRE. I am excited to take up my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph, where I will work under the supervision of Dr. Susan Brown and Dr. Alan Filewod.

John comes to the digital humanities through a PhD in Philosophy that combined game theory with computer programming and simulations. Between completing this degree and taking up a postdoctoral fellowship he acted as the Program Coordinator for Philosophy for Children Alberta which saw him doing everything from building websites and online registration systems to filling the role of Director for the Eurekamp summer camp series. John also produced a prototype tool for quickly visualizing information within the Old Bailey Online project. Outside of academia John is a leader and trainer with Scouts Canada. His current fellowship is divided evenly across two projects: the Text Mining and Visualization Project and the Modelling and Prototyping arm of INKE. The TMV Project is associated with EMiC through its connections to Orlando and CWRC. In this position I support both these projects by developing and contributing expertise in semantic web technologies, particularly RDF and ontologies.

Meagan Timney was the first Postdoctoral Fellow for the Editing Modernism in Canada project. She worked at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria, under the direction of Dr. Ray Siemens (Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing) and Dr. Dean Irvine (Dalhousie University; Director of the Editing Modernism in Canada Project). She is also an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UVIC.

Meagan held a SSHRC Doctoral fellowship, and was the recipient of the 2008 Dalhousie President’s Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. Her areas of research and scholarship include: theories and practice of digital scholarly editing, interface design, human-computer interaction, knowledge mobilization and collaborative digital environments, as well as Victorian literature and industrial culture, and working-class women’s poetry.

Meagan is the editor of the Victorian Working-Class Women Poets Archive. Her article, “Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics,” will appear in the Spring 2011 edition of Victorian Poetry. She was also an associate editor for Compendium 2: Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the University (2007-2008), and was the Graduate student co-instructor for Dean Irvine’s class, “Editing and Publishing,” which provided students with professional and theoretical training in print and digital text editing—she taught classes on topics such as text encoding (HTML/CSS/XML), coding for online journals, proofing code, digital language troubleshooting, and PKP’s Open Journal Systems. Meagan is also a triathlete, and has competed at both the national and international level.